Nauczanie a profesja (anglosaski punkt widzenia)

Abstract

The article concerns the question whether teaching can be a profession. In Polish, such wording of the problem seems artificial, since the words: profession, occupation, trade, are treated as synonyms. Therefore the author resorts to the conventions applying in the English speaking countries, where these words have their precisely defined connotations. The starting point for the presented considerations are the sociological definitions of the term “profession”: hence the references to Flexner, Tyler, or Blauch. Their analyses allow determining the conditions which must be fulfilled by a type of human activity to be recognized as a “profession”. Applying these criteria to teaching raises some doubts, which are strengthened by the critique of teacher’s occupation presented by Kemmis and Carr. Can teaching be regarded as a profession, if teachers have been deprived of autonomy, both individually and collectively? Yet the last two decades of the 20th century brought numerous publications on the professionalism of teaching. Then, is teaching truly a profession? Pratte and Rury’s suggestion may answer this question to some extent: they call teaching “a craft-profession”. Still, stating the original problem in such a way seems to place it in the sphere of consciousness, and distances it from the proposals of Tyler or Becker, who aim at defining objective markers of a “profession”. Thus we still face the necessity to discover the answer to the question: is teaching a profession?